


...And They Were Hallmates! (Oh My God They Were Hallmates)

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Anxiety, First Kiss, First Meetings, Light Angst, M/M, Meet-Cute, Musical References, One Shot, Operas, POV Remus Lupin, Self-Indulgent, Student!Remus, singer!Sirius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 21:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16354208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: “Leonard Bernstein was a fucking god,” Sirius says intensely, as though Remus would have fought him on it.“I like West Side Story,” Remus offers, taking his own turn to laugh when Sirius’ looks at him like Remus has just said he thinks shag carpeting is a very admirable design choice.“This is so much more than West Side story could ever be,” he explains reverently, gesturing with the album in a way that makes his torso look particularly ridiculous for the square expanse hugged to his chest. “This is inner turmoil, and loss, and love, and—and pure fucking love for music itself.”“I’m not arguing,” Remus says, both hands up in his defense.“Good, because you would lose. What’s number two?”—There’s a new neighbor across the way during Remus’ most stressful semester yet, and he’s made a...creative first impression.





	...And They Were Hallmates! (Oh My God They Were Hallmates)

**Author's Note:**

> If I close my eyes hard enough, I can pretend it's still 2016 and Vine is still funny to anybody besides me. Special thanks to the RS Discord for enabling my "what if" brain, this one is for you <3

It’s supposed to say “Hello.”

Isn’t it?

Remus blinks as he exits his apartment on Sunday morning, arrested in his entryway by the visual assault of the door across the hall for unit 11C. A hideous pink wreath, garlanded with plastic white and red roses, hangs on it to announce “Hello” in garish script—although the “o” looks like it’s been violently cannibalized by something that dines on kitsch to leave the wreath simply advertising “Hell.”

The sound of asymmetrical, muffled strains of dramatic orchestral swells are blaring from behind it, along with heavy footfalls and thunks and what might be somebody singing nonsensically along with the melody of the music. Remus glances down at his watch. It’s a quarter past seven o’clock in the morning. 

He sighs lightly to himself and shakes his head to clear it, needing to face the nip of winter and the monolithic threat of his capstone thesis he’s trying to get a headstart on before his final spring semester begins instead of strange and grandmotherly decor. Just his luck that a loud new neighbor would move in across the hall amid Remus’ most stressful stretch of university so far. But he’ll be fine. Besides, it’s just a little music and bustle. He can play his own music while he studies. He beelines for the elevator bank just around the corner from his room and jumps when a shattering crash comes from 11C and the person singing to themself inside curses loudly and colorfully in more than one language. 

He’ll be fine, Remus assures himself. The elevator arrives with a ping.  _ Hello!  _ He closes his eyes and sighs again, long and low.

He’ll be fine.

—

Four hours later, Remus thumbs the elevator button up to the eleventh floor with a scowl. He made a grand total of No Progress Whatsoever on his paper outline. The campus library had been crammed with new students and their families looking around owl-eyed at the interior where Art Deco had gone to die in catastrophic bursts of mahogany, making it impossible for Remus to concentrate. Not even the stacks had been safe from all the less-than-subtle muttering.  _ Send In The Hounds: The Importance of Wolves in Folklore from Ancient Greece to Medieval Europe _ is shaping up to be a whopping 17 words long, all of them in a title he isn’t even sure he’s going to keep. The reticle of his word processor had blinked at him, mocking, as he tried to shut out the noise of too many people coming in and out like a revolving door of wide-eyed explorers.  _ It’s a fucking library, _ he had wanted to shout,  _ you’re supposed to whisper!  _ Not even the 45-minute looping atmosphere track that always helped him spit out essay after stellar essay throughout the last three years had helped him tune it out.

Perhaps his apartment would be better.

Perhaps, Remus amends as he emerges from the elevator to see the door to 11C now flung wide open and spewing its racket bodily into the hall, he’s flat-out doomed. 

Remus tries to skirt into his apartment without having to say hello— _ Or rather “hell”— _ to the person making enough noise for the entire floor, but before he can reach his door the tenant, still humming along to similar music from earlier in the morning, emerges. 

He has a potted plant tucked under one arm, some sort of ficus in a wide-bellied urn that looks, for some reason, vaguely familiar. His long black hair is knotted into a loose braid that hangs over one shoulder and he’s wearing a faded sweatshirt with an angular logo on it, the origins of which could likely be either an independent record label or a brewery. He has slim, dark jeans, an overfilled keyring clipped to one of his belt loops, and an out-of-place pair of fuzzy purple house slippers. His face is austere and angular and, Remus realizes with a particularly insulting twist in his guts, severely handsome, with pale grey eyes that light up when he sees Remus standing dumbly in the middle of the hallway. 

“Morning!” The new neighbor shifts the plant to lean against his hip with one arm as though holding toddler as he raises his free hand to wave jauntily. He has chipped black polish on his fingernails. 

“Hi,” Remus replies, blinks, nods at the open door behind the man he now sees is filled with flung-open boxes and suitcases. “Moving in?”

“Indeed I am, are we neighbors?” The man’s smile is broad and shows his teeth unabashedly, and his voice pulls, rich and healthily, with the curves of a foreign accent that Remus can’t quite place. 

“I’m right across the hall, 16A.” Remus jerks his thumb at his door—bare except for his unit number placard in stark difference to his neighbor’s madness of floral plastic. The tenant’s expression goes a couple watts brighter. 

“Fantastic! Would you like to come in?” He gestures back into his apartment with the potted plant. “I’ve a box of ‘farewell’ chocolates from home boxed up somewhere that I could share.”

“I—maybe later, thank you, I’ve got a bit to take care of today.” Remus refuses with all the grace he can and can’t help but smile a little at the other man’s eagerness for hospitality. 

“Well knock if you’re free, I’ll be here all year unless I feel like shattering my lease.” Remus’ neighbor winks in an effortless sort of way that makes it clear it isn’t a gesture he makes rarely. He holds out the hand not cradling his plant. “I’m Sirius, Sirius Black.”

“Remus Lupin.” He accepts the handshake, warm and solid, and shares a surprisingly easy smile with Sirius, Sirius Black. The other man’s eyes dart quickly across Remus’ face, no doubt cataloguing his new hallmate— _ faded overcoat, tortoiseshell glasses, needs a haircut, too many freckles,  _ the incessant inner critic in Remus’ brain lists out for him. Remus’ own smile falters at that and he salvages the motion as best he can by squinting quizzically at the plant in Sirius’ arms. “Usually people get rid of things when they move  _ out,  _ not in.”

“Ah, this! I took it from the lobby. It didn’t end up matching the room so I’m returning it.” Sirius pats the plant’s pot solidly. “I think it misses it friends anyways.”  _ And THAT’s why it looked familiar. _

“Don’t let me hold you back from your mission then,” Remus says, chuckling a little despite himself—he doesn’t think he’s ever met somebody so eccentric who he didn’t immediately hate. Sirius gives him a steely salute, all humored seriousness, before he cracks into another broad grin. He has fantastic teeth.

“Onward!” With his door left wide open, baring its in-progress insides while music continues to flow out in heavy symphonic waves, Sirius marches to the elevator bank and presses the Down button with one foot. “Honestly though,” he says to Remus, who pauses in the middle of slotting his key into his deadbolt, “let me know about those chocolates. I can hardly finish them all myself.”

The elevator chimes as it arrives and Sirius sticks one leg into hold the door, still looking expectantly at Remus.

“Sure thing,” Remus promises palely, tossing up a hand to mirror Sirius’ goodbye wave just as cheery as his greeting. The elevator slides shut behind the new neighbor and Remus pushes into his own apartment, his heart beating a couple ticks faster than normal for no good goddamn reason. He closes his eyes and takes a low breath, trying not to focus on the thrum of music that he can still hear from across the hall.

_ Please, _ he thinks to whichever useless deities might be looking down and laughing at him today,  _ please just let me finish this fucking degree without imploding. _

—

Through the next several days before classes begin, Remus sees nothing but bits and pieces of his new neighbor coming or going—always with thick packets of paper stuffed under Sirius’ arm and a solid metal thermos, always with that same goofy-looking wave. They don’t talk beyond pleasantries but Remus certainly hears more of Sirius through the bulwark of both their doors and the disheartening discovery that sound carries through the ventilation system in the ceiling—always some sort of intensely dramatic slam of symphonic madness, or arcing strains of opera that make Remus think, with unbidden pulls to his scabbed over grief, of his late mother—but he very little learns little of the man beyond their initial interaction as Remus builds his great semesterly wall of “Do Not Bother Talking To Me” around himself and prepares for classes. 

And he likes it that way. At least, that’s what Remus tells the twinging in his heart when he thinks of the attractive portrait Sirius certainly makes.

_ He’s your hallmate, _ Remus scowls to himself the Monday night before his first class of the semester, nested in a pile of blankets on his couch with half an opening thesis paragraph slapped together from the well-worn tomes of mythology splayed open on the coffee table.  _ That’s a terrible idea. He’s handsome, but chasing after him would be distracting at best. Write your fucking paper. _

Preferring to keep his late afternoons and evenings clear for studying, Remus has stacked his final semester’s schedule with morning classes whenever possible. Despite making him get up and face the day like some sort of masochistic monk with a daily pilgrimage to the Classics building, morning classes grant him at least the solace of commute to campus not entirely choked with other people and students. He can turn up his music, tune everything out for a half-hour, and center himself. That’s how it’s been for the last year-and-a-half since he moved off campus after returning from the dark year of academic leave, and that’s how he likes it. 

Or, that’s how it  _ used  _ to be. 

Remus suppresses a groan when, on his way out to catch the bus to his first lecture, a hand catches the door of the elevator behind him. It’s fingernails are painted with a fresh coat of black polish. 

“Sorry, sorry, don’t want be l—ah, morning, Remus!” The door slides back open to reveal Sirius, his hair knotted up in a bun with several layers of scarves and a fashionably thrashed-looking coat thrown around his shoulders. The portfolio he always carries with him is in the crook of his arm, alongside a satchel peppered with colorful enamel pins.

“Hi.” Remus removes one earbud and smiles a wan greeting, would much rather be alone with the sound of Leslie Feist but can’t for the life of him find the compulsion to be rude to Sirius. “Headed to class?”

“My first is at nine o’clock, don’t want to be late. Figured I’d divine the bus schedule and then just kill time on campus when I get there. I’ve never taken a bus before!”

Remus furrows his eyebrows and takes a moment to add up the abject excitement bursting from Sirius and the well-curated, vaguely-European fashion sense written all over him atop the decidedly not-American accent.  _ Oh.  _ Sirius is one of the rich international students.

“There aren’t any transfers on the line, it’s an easy ride,” Remus says as he reluctantly removes his other earbud and winds his headphones away into his coat pocket. “You can come with me, I’m headed to Gladfelter.”

“Is that the building that looks like Josef Stalin’s wet dream?” Sirius asks as the elevator stops and slides open. Remus can’t help the paroxysm of laughter that catches him unawares with the dirty wit, and he nods while stepping into the lobby. 

“That’s the one. You’ve seen campus already?”

“Don’t worry, you won’t have to shepherd me about like a nearsighted freshman—I’ve been going back and forth to Presser since I moved in. Unfortunately a piano won’t fit through our building’s windows, can you believe it?” Sirius smiles with genial sarcasm when Remus turns to him at the corner outside their front door, the bus stand sign wobbling slightly in the wind that blows past. 

“You’re a piano major?” Remus find a ridiculous note of hope in his voice, for what? Relatability? It’s silly. The closest he’s ever come to playing well enough himself was sitting on his father’s lap as a boy and pretending Lyall’s expert fingers on the keys were his own.

Sirius has screwed open the cap on his thermos, over the lip of which three herbal teabag tags hang and winnow in the air, and starting taking a sip. He shakes his head and swallows before answering; “Vocal performance, first year opera graduate student. How about you, locked up there in the Tower of Brutalism?”

“Classics, ancient mythology. I’m in my last semester of undergrad.” Remus’ tongue feels dry as he bites back the twinging compulsion to exclaim  _ My mother was a singer! _ because he doesn’t need to connect with his neighbor; he doesn’t need a friend, he doesn’t need any distractions, he doesn’t need to find anything to tie him to this godforsaken university any more than his bachelor’s degree. 

“That’s so cool,” Sirius hums. He adjusts one of his scarves and recaps his thermos before chuckling to himself. “Thank you, by the way.”

“What for?” Remus asks as he pushes his glasses a bit higher up on his nose, looking back over at Sirius away from his blank stare across the street as he hears the telltale grumble of the bus approaching around the corner. 

“For not asking me ‘sing some opera for me then.’” The bus pulls up and slides open its doors, and Remus steps through with a glance back at Sirius as he pulls a fare token from his pocket to slide into the turnstile. “If I had a day for every time somebody’s pulled that one on me,” Sirius continues from behind him, “I’d live forever.”

Remus sniffs a laugh to himself and finds an empty pair of seats, most of the bus clear before rush hour has begun in earnest. “I know what not to ask, trust me,” he says darkly as Sirius sits beside him. Remus shoves aside the thought of the sweet, pleasant smell of sandalwood he can lightly catch from Sirius at this proximity. He hesitates briefly on the sentence before his tongue gives up and spills it; “My mother was an opera singer.”

“How fun! Do you have any inclination then?” Sirius beams at him, entirely earnest, and at the back of Remus’ mind he wonders how much honesty can fit in one person. 

“I think that sort of thing skips a generation. I’ve never been any good at making music, I just like listening to it,” he explains somewhat lamely. There’s a vague pain in Remus’ guts at the abstract thoughts of his mother he’s brought up, and ignores the advice of his father and the therapist he quit seeing three months ago and crams it down like crumpled drafts in his wastebasket. He focuses instead on the way Sirius is looking around at the interior of the bus like he’s on a spaceship, watching their neighborhood outside the windows pass in the wintry morning blur of motion as they go. “Honestly, you’ve  _ never _ been on a bus before?” Remus’ voice takes him almost by surprise as his instincts seem to want to reach for camaraderie when all his higher functions want to do is roll back into himself. 

“Never. They’re all over back home, but I’ve only seen them from the outside.”

“Not even ridden one to school?”

“I went to boarding school. My mother is Italian and my father’s family has been in London since before time immemorial, so I would spend school terms in Britain and my summers studying and singing in Milan. You’ve heard of La Scala?” 

_ That explains the mish-mash accent.  _ “Yeah, I’ve seen pictures.”

Sirius smiles as though Remus had just complimented his hair. “I had my first chorus role there when I was sixteen and have been there and back to perform in ensembles and supporting roles quite regularly since,” he preens. Remus tries his hardest but can’t be annoyed at the man sitting beside him, but he can’t. Sirius Black is simply... _ endearing.  _ It should really feel more unnerving than it does. 

“What are you doing studying here then?” Remus asks. He only realizes he’s furrowed his brow with that professorial pitch his father likes to call  _ Doctor Lupin _ when Remus gets too analytical for his own good once he sees Sirius’ eyes take on an amused sort of glimmer looking at Remus’ nose bridge. Remus consciously relaxes his expression and habitually readjusts his glasses. 

“I won a grant to study with Euphemia Potter.” Sirius says the woman’s name grandly, adding all the impact of unseen underlines to it. Remus hasn’t heard of her, but then again Remus largely stopped paying attention to the performing arts world when his mother’s illness took its worst and unsalvageable decline several years ago. “She’s from the same town as my mother’s family but is significantly less vile than any of them,” Sirius continues, intently watching a stretch of bare trees in a public park pass through the window on Remus’ left side as he speaks. “She’s a perfect saint in my opinion, and she’s done more with her career in twenty years than most can do with forty. Studying with her will benefit me far more than just faffing about at La Scala my whole life.”

Remus has to laugh then, at himself and the situation and all the strange pieces of Sirius that make all the sense in the world and none at all at the same time. They pass the rest of the bus ride with unprompted stories of his schooling growing up that Remus finds he’s content to listen to, and when they disembark at campus and go their separate ways to class Remus realizes he’s forgotten to have his weekly existential crisis.

_ Well, _ he thinks as he replaces his earbuds and huddles into his coat,  _ still have tomorrow and every day after for that.  _

—

Just as he predicted, Remus’ sanity hardly holds through syllabus week.

By the following Monday, he’s reduced to a nervous wreck. He’s cross-legged on his floor with his hands knit into his hair like some sort of fucking crocheting project, five different books splayed open in front of him full of words he can hardly read with the way the text is beginning to swim before his eyes. He can’t do this. He’s picked the the wrong discipline, he doesn’t have the knowledge or the bravery or, or the  _ wit _ to be a professor someday, he can’t handle the deadlines and the expectations—as his breathing picks up,  _ in out in out in out, _ like some kind of frightened rabbit through his nose, Remus is furious at himself.

His anxiety was never this bad before his mother passed. She made him promise he would keep studying, keep dreaming, keep learning and writing and always look upward, how dare he fail her memory? How fucking  _ dare _ he slip into these tar pits of inability and shortsightedness, and FUCK, he can hear  _ every fucking thing  _ above a whisper tone from Sirius’ apartment through the goddamn air vents, and his neighbor has been making the ridiculous sounds of vocal warm-ups for the past ten minutes and hasn’t shown any signs of stopping. Great.  _ Lovely. _ Remus has a thesis to draft in full by next week and his fucking character of a hallmate can’t shut the hell up for one evening, can’t—

Oh.

_ Oh. _

Remus’ thought processes top dead as Sirius begins to sing.

The sound is slightly muffled from its journey through the walls and the HVAC system, but Remus knows the vocal line immediately as though he were six years old again in his mother’s arms as she sang his favorite leider to him whenever he asked her to.

_ “Du mein Gedanke, du mein Sein und Werden! _ __   
_ Du meines Herzens erste Seligkeit! _ __   
_ Ich liebe dich wie nichts auf dieser Erden, _ __   
__ Ich liebe dich in Zeit und Ewigkeit!"   
  
Remus closes his eyes, fists at his temples, as he focuses on the music and begins to slow his panic. Sirius’ voice is a powerful baritone, underlain with surprising tenderness that makes itself evident even through the distance of different apartments.

_ “Ich denke dein, kann stets nur deine denken, _ __   
_ Nur deinem Glück ist dieses Herz geweiht, _ __   
_ Wie Gott auch mag des Lebens Schicksal lenken, _ _   
_ __ Ich liebe dich in Zeit und Ewigkeit!”

It’s strange to hear the tune outside of his mother’s bell-clear soprano, but Remus finds himself breathing evenly as Grieg’s meandering melody comes to a close. Enchanted, he snaps back to reality when he hears Sirius clear his throat gently and hum a few short bursts of a bit more warm-up fare. Jesus Christ, if that was Sirius’ equivalent of practicing then Remus can hardly imagine what the glory of a fully-limbered performance would sound like from him. His hallmate starts in on the art song again, from the top, and Remus leans his head back against the couch to simply listen—no wonder he’s performed at La Scala, it shows in spades.  _ What the fuck is he doing in graduate school? _

No matter. Sirius is here, and right now  he’s helping. Remus’ mind slowly untangles itself with room to work—finally—and Remus is suddenly very, very glad that Sirius Black lives across the hall.

Remus owes him a bottle of wine for this.

—

Friday after next, Remus finds himself holding a middle-of-the-road red wine under his arm as he maneuvers around the garish curl of Sirius’ door hanging to find and use the door knocker. The ugly pink cursive has been amended with a construction paper letter that looks as though it’s been taken from a bulletin board somewhere on campus, so now “Hell” instead reads as “Hella.” The door swings open to reveal Sirius looking slightly surprised before Remus finished ruminating on the change.

“Nice wreath,” he says with all the suavity of a baby giraffe.

“You think so?” Sirius asks, not skipping a single beat. “Somebody in my studio class described a performance as ‘hella good,’ and I thought it would fit nicely. I’m glad the neighborhood agrees.”

Sirius beams at his own story as Remus proffers the wine without preamble, and the grin shifts from pleased with himself to pleased with the surprise of friendliness. “I—heard you singing the other day, the Grieg. Through the air vents, it—I really enjoyed it. I figured this is the best compensation I can offer right now,” Remus explains.  _ Why are you nervous? What do you have to be nervous about? _

“Ha! Are you being real right now, this isn’t a joke?” Sirius looks elated and doesn’t wait for Remus to answer one way or another before he graciously takes the bottle. “Amazing! The most I’ve ever got for a neighbor overhearing me was a broomstick to the floorboards! Here, come in, share it with me, it’s only fair.”

“Oh, I have to—”

“I insist.” Sirius is already in his kitchen, utensil drawer thrown open to take out the wine opener and start deftly at the cork.

Fuck it. It’s a Friday. Remus can put off his own preoccupations for at least half and hour.

Remus complies and steps over the threshold, closing the door softly behind him. The apartment interior is surprisingly chic for the cluttered euro-punk image of himself that Sirius presents. Show posters and season announcements are handsomely framed on the walls, some of them signed. Sirius has set up the open floor plan to face the window instead of the television, relegated to the side of the room like an afterthought, with a bookcase crammed full of sheet music beside it. A music stand with an exercise ball and a bench in front of it sit across from the breakfast nook in the kitchen, where Sirius has begun pouring two hefty servings of red into delicate-looking wine glasses.

“You have really nice furniture,” Remus says as he moseys further into the apartment, slapping himself on the back of his proverbial wrist for a vocabulary that sounds like something out of a lesson reader instead a student of classics’ brain.

“Took most of it from a summer home my father wanted emptied, he was going to throw it into whatever landfill the egregiously-rich put all their old houseware. Works much better for me here. Hey, Cheers!” Sirius rounds the counter and offers Remus his glass, and Remus clinks the edge together and sips. It’s not great, but it was also only $11. Remus Lupin refuses to pay more than $14 for a bottle of wine. If Sirius is offended by its vintage, he dutifully says nothing.

Remus casts his eyes around the apartment again and his eyes light up when he sees the veritable altar to Sirius’ turntable tucked into the corner across from his music stacks. It’s perched on a low shelf just as overfilled with vinyl as the shelves are with music and technique books, and Remus walks to it without meaning to.

“Holy  _ shit, _ you have an LP12?” Remus ogles the polished wood around the turntable’s edge, the unique curves of the needle arm, the simple modernism of its design. He feels like he shouldn’t even be allowed to touch it.

“That,” Sirius says weightily, coming over to the edge of the record shelf, “was the first thing I ever bought with a paycheck from singing.”

“It’s fucking beautiful,” Remus breathes. He runs a finger along its base and feels as though he’s seeing something he’s only ever expected in a pop art museum. “I just—I have a Crosley.”

“You listen to vinyl?” Sirius’ eyes are sharp when he looks up suddenly from adoring his own turntable, alerted like a hound to the point at its mark in Remus’ conversation.

“I collect it, have been since I was ten.”

“My dear neighbor, you’re in  _ fine _ company,” Sirius announces broadly. He opens a palm at the rows of his own collection, inviting Remus to browse, and Remus grins as he kneels down in front of the minor library Sirius has shelved beneath it. The tart pleasantness of connection feels slightly awkward in the hollows of his chest, but he figures inwardly that any if he wants to not waste away in the annals of his own misery for at least the rest of the academic year, he may as well get used to his. Besides, it’s sort of...fun, to feel responsibility fall away from his shoulders for a moment.

After a few minutes of browsing and asking Sirius why the hell he owns some of the strange esoterica he has sorted in with his music— _ Whale Songs of the Pacific; How to Play Bridge Vol. 1 & 2; Stereophonic Frequency Test Record,  _ among some of the more frivolous ones, the answers to which were “I like album art, doesn’t always matter what’s inside it”—Remus finds he’s drawing parallels between their two collections.

“I tend to go for a first press, even if it’s weathered,” Remus says, his head tipped sideways to read the spines of a row in the L-thru-M shelf.

“You know what you should do?” Sirius posits, and Remus looks up at the sudden brightening of his voice. He’s leaning easily against the wall with his arms crossed over the layered sweater-over-button-up combination that Remus thinks looks so ridiculous on most people but somehow fits Sirius alluringly well. Sirius points a thumb back to his front door. “Pop back across the hall, gather up your top three desert island albums, and I’ll keep the wine safe til you’re back.”

“Do I get to hear yours as well if I do?” Remus smiles even through the challenge in his voice, and when Sirius returns it he feels the corners of his mouth stretch even wider.

“Of  _ course, _ who do you think I am?”

“My singing neighbor with a record habit.”

“Aye, well then you’ve got me absolutely pinned. You have five minutes, no hemming and hawing, just the ones you would grab in a fire,” Sirius explains as he ushers Remus back to the door, gracefully taking and depositing both their wine glasses on the counter to wait.

“That’s different from desert island albums, isn’t it?”

“The apartment is on fire and you’re being evacuated to a desert island.”

“Harsh,” Remus says through a laugh as they move into the hall and Sirius waits on his threshold for Remus to open his own door. “Alright. See you in five.”

Sirius’ door shuts softly as Remus sweeps through his, and he goes directly to his own record cabinet—looking significantly less impressive compared to Sirius’ collection at this point, but that’s besides the point. He’s strangely giddy as he flicks through the albums, some in plastic and others so old they’ve almost nothing left around the record sleeve, and he doesn’t hate it at all.

Remus knows what he needs to grab first, and he reverently pulls out  _ Tender Prey, _ the moody cover one of his permanent favorites to make him smile slightly to himself when he recalls Sirius’  _ I like album art. _ He sets that one on the coffee table behind him and turns back to the shelves, casting about for what on earth he could consider a desert island album but also show off a bit to the music student across the hall.

_ Show off to him? Why would you want that? _ Remus’ inner critic is acerbic as ever, but Remus finds he has the wherewithal in this moment to snap back at it;  _ Because he’s handsome and I’m lonely and even if he just wants to talk for a bit it’s better than drowning in fucking Samuel Butler all evening. Shut up. _

Envigored, Remus looks at his experimental and electronic shelf—organized by genre and  _ then _ by alphabet as opposed to Sirius’ full alphabetizing, although almost all of his that Remus could glance at were classical and opera records. Remus pulls the lime green spine of  _ Lost and Safe, _ his favorite out of an extensive collection of The Books, and then combs back to his own small collection of classical records in an effort to find something that might make him come off as a bit more cultured than he feels.

Most of the albums he has in this genre are from his parents, passed down with amused appreciation when Remus expressed the compulsion to begin collecting records after seeing a display of old LPs at the museum one afternoon. He’s got scads of his mother’s Montserrat Caballe recordings that she got from Remus’ grandmother, piles of his father’s Bach inventions and chorales and not a small amount of Tommy Flanagan jazz records that Remus keeps in with all this because in full honesty, this shelf is for his parents’ music regardless of what it decided to be.

Remus’ heart pulls when he sees the spine of the album he loves more than anything he owns,  _ Would that be too heavy? _ Would it be weird for Remus to drag in the ghost of his mother’s memory and wax poetic about the way she filled Remus’ world with color even before he can remember exactly what her lullabies to him had been? Fuck it. If Sirius can be dramatic and eccentric and wholly captivating while he does it, Remus can meet him on his own court. He pulls out the 1981  _ Rigoletto _ recording, Hope Lupin’s name printing solidly on the front as the top-bill soprano, and gathers his selections up to march back to Sirius’ apartment.

—

Sirius moves them to his sofa, wine taken up again and the bottle coming along with them, with the ridiculous flat of three records stuffed under his sweater. “Secrecy is key,” he crows, flopping down into a crossed-legged sit that still manages to house a unique amount of grace to it. Remus swallows a wide mouthful of wine when he finds himself staring at the quietly indulgent way Sirius rakes his hair across one shoulder and sits down across from his neighbor, setting his albums face-down behind him.

“Who goes first?” Remus asks briskly.

“We’ll show our hands one at a time, you and then me. Show me your first pick then!” Sirius’ eyes dance over the rim of his wine glass and Remus can’t help but smile with the same subtle excitement as he twists back to reveal  _ Tender Prey. _ Sirius’ face lights up.

“I’ve got  _ Abattoir Blues! _ But not in my top three. They’re wonderful though, especially when you’re feeling all dour.”

“Oh, good, my default setting,” Remus deadpans. Sirius bursts with a laugh, a singer’s laugh, melodic and resonant, as he reaches under his sweater to pull out his own first choice. Remus tries not to let the tops of his ears blush too brightly.

_ Mass, _ the simple and angular title on the powder-blue cover. “Leonard Bernstein was a fucking god,” Sirius says intensely, as though Remus would have fought him on it.

“I like  _ West Side Story,” _ Remus offers, taking his own turn to laugh when Sirius’ looks at him as if Remus has just said he thinks shag carpeting is a very admirable design choice.

“This is so much more than West Side story could ever be,” he explains reverently, gesturing with the album in a way that makes his torso look particularly ridiculous for the square expanse hugged to his chest. “This is inner turmoil, and loss, and love, and—and pure fucking love for music itself.”

“I’m not arguing,” Remus says, both hands up in his defense.

“Good, because you would lose. What’s number two?”

Remus pulls  _ Lost and Safe _ around to present it, and Sirius hums thoughtfully before producing a well-loved reissue of  _ The Rite of Spring _ . The image of its cover art, Matisse’s  _ Dance _ , had been displayed proudly on a poster above the piano at one of Remus’ exasperated music teachers’ houses when he was a boy. It’s an image burned into his brain that he associates with lackadaisical effort and the boredom of not quite understanding how to do something, which he feels is quite appropriate for this point of his life.

“Are all your picks classical?” Remus asks as he takes a sip from his glass. Sirius snorts with brilliant derision.

“Technically none of this is classical. It’s all 20th century so far, you should know at least  _ that _ much, mister temporal scholar.”

“Har har. I’ve got one you’ll really like then.”

Remus swallows his pride and the terrifying quiver of apprehension in his heart when he draws out his mother’s recording. 1981, London’s Royal Opera House, Colin Davis conducting; Remus had known every twist of the tragedy’s melodies by the time he was a teenager for the amount of times he spun this record to hear the unrivaled beauty of his mother’s voice as Gilda—idealistic, sweet, self-sacrificing. Everything she had been and more in her role as Remus’ mother.

Sirius is, for the first time in Remus’ short time of knowing him, silent.

“What, I can’t listen to opera and experimental rock at the same time?” Remus asks dryly, shifting in his seat as Sirius stares at the album. Wordlessly, Sirius pulls out the exact same album.

It’s Remus’ turn to gape at the duality, and it takes several long beat before he can even draw thought that isn’t  _ Holy shit what the fuck holy shit what the fuck _ .

“It’s certainly a change in your repertoire,” Sirius says eventually.

“My mother is Gilda on this recording,” Remus blurts. Sirius’ jaw drops.

“Get the fuck out, are you fucking kidding?! You told me your mother was a singer, you didn’t tell me she was Hope Lupin!”

“No joke,” Remus insists, smiling a little at the disbelief on his neighbor’s face.

“Hope Lupin, Hope  _ fucking _ Lupin was your mother.”

“Yes.” Remus chuckles through the word with a cadence that usually belies nervousness, but it feels instead like comfort.

“She’s arguably the greatest soprano who ever lived, do you realize this?”

“Probably not. I saw her perform a lot, but I always liked the way she would sing at home better. Just to me.” Remus’ heart quivers with a combination of sweetness and sadness, and he tries to shove it down. Sirius clearly catches a hint to it, for the sharp intrigue in his eyes softens just a bit.

“Can I ask what she was like? Is that alright?” His voice is gentle, and Remus has a flash of thought back to the leider that floating through his walls last week.

“It’s alright, yeah,” Remus says despite the compulsion to shut down every emotion west of blandness to try and protect himself. “She was the best. I mean, I’d rather not go off on a tangent of my dead mom right now, but she was amazing.”

Sirius tips a grin at him then, warm and smooth, and leans an elbow one one crossed knee to prop his chin on his fist. “And you’re not musical at all, not even a whit?”

Remus grins with relief and thanks for the redirection of the conversation. “Not a lick.”

“At least you’ve good taste. Pick one then, what do you want to listen to?” Sirius leans back and spreads his arms open at the six albums between them, and Remus tries not to show too much relief for Sirius steering the conversation away from his mother. He selects  _ Tender Prey, _ eager for the minor crash of it to siphon out some of his lingering preoccupation.

Remus finishes off his first glass of wine in two nervous gulp as Sirius sets the record on the turntable. He watches the careful ritual of Sirius sliding out the sleeve, browsing the liner notes briefly, brushing at the vinyl itself with a tidy dust brush, and carefully lowering the needle to the edge of the record. “Want more?” Remus asks, his voice feeling thick and awkward on his tongue to jar him from the trance, as he tips the bottle into his glass to pour more.

“Yes indeed.”

Sirius returns to the couch and they both stack the remaining albums on the coffee table beside them as they settle in to listen and chat idly about classes; Sirius adores music history but hates music theory, and Remus is goaded into explaining his personal opinion on the difference between mythology and folklore.

“This is cool,” Sirius says with a gesture to the turntable halfway through  _ Sugar Sugar Sugar.  _ “I like their sound, just never pick them first. My uncle had almost all of the Bad Seeds’ discography, it’s a small world they’re a favorite of yours.” His smile shows his teeth again, the way it did when he had first met Remus in the hallway, and Remus flounders for words for just a moment.

“I just like music that tells a story,” he eventually says.

Remus finds, after more twisting threads of conversation, that he’s happy. Not rattled after pulling at the past’s threads for the first time in a while, but truly content. He knows he has shit to do but the wine has become tasty two thirds of the way through the bottle and Sirius is handsome, and his apartment is comfortable and smells nice and has a lovely view, and Remus just wants to wipe his mind clean for one fucking night. Just one.

Sirius takes them on a tangent into talking about summer stock, particularly the time he was in the United States for the time in New York for Glimmerglass when he was nineteen. Remus perks up with an uncharacteristic willingness to open up with the mention of festival seasons.

“My parents met at during summer stock, in Santa Fe in 1983.” Sirius pours the last of the wine into both of their glasses as he lets Remus open his story and sits back against the battlements of plush pillows stacked against the couch arm behind him to listen. “My dad was a rehearsal pianist there that year for  _ Arabella, _ the Strauss—don’t look at me like that, I don’t know opera that well but I know this one because my dad told it all the fucking time. My mom was in on the first day of rehearsals to practice that one aria, the one that opens with that great melody arc,  _ Mein Elemer _ ? Whichever that one was—”

“ _ Mein Elemer! Das hat so einen sonderbaren Klang... _ ” Sirius sings gently, perfectly in time, his voice high up in his range like a murmur but holding all the dormant clarity and power Remus had heard through the walls the other day. Remus nods quickly.

“God, yes, that one, how do you just pull tunes out of the air like that?” he marvels. Sirius laughs.

“Training. And I also sold my soul to devil, you know how these things go. Sorry, continue, please, I’m interested now.” He fixes Remus with an expectant look that Remus quite enjoys the feeling of in the pit of his lungs, and so he continues.

“Anyways, my dad starts playing that monster of an introduction, just really knocking it out of the park, completely in the zone, but when my mother made that entrance he was so amazed that he just stopped playing. Dead-cold, forgot how to make his fingers work. They got through rehearsal eventually, but he asked her to dinner the second rehearsal was over. And there’s history; ten years later, hello little Remus.”

“Your father is a professional pianist and your mother is one of the paragons of opera, how the  _ fuck _ did you not inherit any of that?” Sirius hums, both hands around his wine glass with his eyes narrowed comically at Remus.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Remus snorts. “None of the instruments I tried stuck. I started with viola—”

“Well there’s your problem, that’s the backup axle of the orchestra.”

“Very funny. Piano escapes me, I’m no good at guitar, and I can’t carry a tune.” Remus ticks the failed instruments off on his fingers and sips at his glass as Sirius stretches out one long leg to loosen it from the fold beneath him.

“What else can you tell me about yourself then, neighbor mine?” He asks.

Remus shrugs. “What’s to tell?”

“Anything. Start small. What’s your favorite color?”

“Green.”

“What’s your favorite season?”

“Winter.”

“What’s your birth sign?”

Remus furrows his eyebrows with a guileful half-smile, emboldened by the wine and the gradual discovery of how much he enjoys conversation with his hallmate. “Are you trying to pick me up?”

“Astute.” Sirius winks at him as he had the first day they met, not too heavy-handed but just lighthearted enough to set Remus’ pulse a-flutter for a moment.

Remus fiddles with the cuff of his sweater and glances down at the couch cushions. “I’m a pisces.”

They go back and forth with the trading information, the small souvenirs of factoids that each of them can construct into a fuller picture of the man sitting across from him—Sirius supplies the mirroring answers of red, summer, and scorpio. They dissolve eventually into a natural cuve of conversation as they fall to the empty bottom of the wine bottle, and once it’s gone after about an hour of working on it Remus somehow finds him on his back long-ways across the couch with his head resting on Sirius’ thigh. Ever on-brand, Remus is on a long-winded screed about stress.

“I just think it’s ridiculous that they expect us to shoulder so much. I mean, I understand it’s academia, and I do want to be a professor someday, but sometimes I don’t believe I physically have the capacity to handle it, you know?” He gestures up into the air above him, as though the ceiling would supply any sort of counter-argument.

“Oh, I know,” Sirius hums from above him. One of hands has found its way idly into Remus’ hair, right at the crown of his hair, to wind through the curls in unconscious fascination. Remus quietly adores it. “Opera is approximately half talent and half politics, and learning how to navigate that can drive someone mad in a matter of weeks. Not to mention the cost—”

Remus moans with mock anguish and puts his hands over his face. “Don’t even get my  _ started _ on my fucking loans.”

Sirius laughs and slides his hand down to the base of Remus’ skull to stroke at the shorter hair there instead. “Okay, I won’t.”

Remus likes very much the way Sirius dives into and around conversation, like some sort of leaf caught in the wind that loves every second of the ride. Sirius looks down at him after a moment with an enigmatic little smile and Remus returns it, warm, happy to unwind, feeling very at home with Sirius’ hand in his hair in Sirius’ apartment—literally, it’s a reverse copy of his own floor plan.

“I didn’t want to like you when I met you,” Remus finds himself murmuring.

“That’s a strange way to say ‘You’re so fucking cool, Sirius, wow,’” Sirius replies, whip-sharp wit striking Remus’ core and making him laugh.

“I mean it, I thought you were overwhelming.” He closes his eyes and settles himself on his couch, against Sirius’ lap. “And you are. But in a good way.”

“I’m going to choose to construe that as a compliment,” Sirius warns with humorous darkness above him. After a moment he shifts gently, moving Remus’ position with almost tender care to let him lie back on the couch as he stands. Remus opens his eyes to see him back at the turntable that had, he notices now, reached the end of the record and been off for the last ten minutes. 

“Do The Books next,” Remus suggests, his voice a lazy but contented curl. Sirius picks up  _ Lost and Safe _ and pulls the record sleeve out with a secretive little smile that Remus doesn’t miss. “Drop the needle. They’re fun and weird and it’s always fun to gamble on what you get from them.”

“Aye aye, captain,” Sirius murmurs. He set the record down and gingerly lowers the needle arm about halfway into the vinyl’s grooves, and Remus watches the way his careful fingers look holding such a delicate piece of machinery. He lets his imagination run briefly with what they might feel like skating across his face and neck the way they had been against his scalp.

The music starts up at the begging of  _ It Never Changes To Stop _ , with all its timepiece-ticking strums and smearing strings, and Sirius remains at the turntable for a few moments to listen. “Oh, I like this a lot,” he says almost to himself.

Remus isn’t quite in his own head as he sighs lightly. “I like  _ you _ a lot,” he whispers. It’s perfectly audible, but he isn’t embarrassed in the slightest. Surety feels new on him, it’s something he hasn’t tried to wear for a long time, but he finds it comfortable as he shifts up to sit and lean against the back of the couch with his cheek on his hand. Sirius comes back over and sits opposite, much closer than before.

“Hello,” Sirius murmurs, those grey eyes alight with charm and calm and everything Remus realizes he’s been missing for years.

“Don’t you mean ‘Hella’?” Remus teases back, leaning slightly closer with the pitch of conspiratorial humor.

Sirius reaches out to tug at Remus shirt collar, pulling him even nearer, as Remus is at once completely taken by surprise and not surprised at all. “I mean for you to kiss me, please,” Sirius whispers.

Remus closes his eyes and complies—complies with Sirius’ gentle request, complies with the compulsion deep inside him to get very close to this man indeed, complies with the very core of his spirit to give himself the ephemeral gift of  _ happiness. _ Sirius’ lips are soft and warm and slightly hesitant against his own, pressing with the wonderment of discovery as they breathe one another in for several seconds. They pull apart at the same time and share the suspended moment of awe; Sirius swallows, looking as through a shooting star has just leapt down his throat. Remus is taken then with the consuming desire to see Sirius ecstatic, make him feel just as free as he’s made Remus whether he knows it or not.

They both surge forward at the same time to meet again, lips meshing with the hunger of reverence, and it’s everything Remus has ever wanted.

Remus should probably be surprised that Sirius’ mouth fits so comfortably against his, but he isn’t. He should also probably be worrying about his paper, his disposition, his life in general, but he really doesn’t want to. In this moment, surrounded by sighing strings and the brilliant oddity of experimentation, all that matters is connection. The wreath on the door was wrong—this apartment isn’t Hell. This exuberant and eccentric hallmate is the furthest thing from a disaster Remus could have asked for.

As his lips slide against Sirius’ with simmering and eager exploration, Remus is exceedingly glad he said Hello.


End file.
